Palimpsest
“I want to give you what you need, Ludo. It is important to me, as I think you and I will shortly be friends for a very long time. You gave your voice for me, like the mermaid in the fairy tale. I was charmed. I was wooed. I admit it. And you are so close to me now, it is like Christmas Eve. Don't you feel it?”
He nods, helpless to do more. They are quiet, and she skips a stone or two down the cream-churned river.
She stops and stands on her tiptoes to look him in the eye. She is so young and her brow is so clear There are no frown lines in her.
“Are you ready?” she says, and her voice is strong and steady. “I love you. I have loved you for nine years, and I knew it was nine and not eight. I only said that to hurt you. That summer in Ostia was the core of us, and it was shining and warm and the color of pecan shells. All of this I did in a frenzy, a madness, but it did not touch us, in our walls, our lair There, I was yours alone, and I was happy. I am your beast, and you are my saint, and I forgive you, for that is what noble beasts do, and I am a noble beast. And beasts forget, too. It is only the sadness of saints that they cannot.”
She kisses him, and her breasts are warm and soft against his body. “I love you, and I am your wife, and I forgive you of all the sins of this world, all the sins we invented just to commit within our cave. I love you,” and the light of her eyes seems to shift to something darker and cleverer than his Lucia, something vast and old. “I love you, Ludovico. In a world without end. I love you.”
She walks away from him, up the low rise toward the dancing and the lights, and she is carrying her sandals by the straps as she did when last he saw that dress, the torchlight on her hair like an absolution.
FOUR
THE FAVOR OF VESTA
I will never forgive you,” Nerezza said, clutching her wrist in her hand so tightly that it left red crescent moons in her skin. They had gone for coffee, because she could not bear the house.
Ludo tried to smile at her, his eel-girl, lost in the brumey water, circling herself in the dark.
“I have had to listen to the three of you fucking and laughing for days,” Nerezza snapped, “and I am sick to death of you.”
He was quiet for a long while. Why had he not taken them to his apartment? Because it is Lucia's place, and it is pleasant to be among people who know the same secrets. Agostino, Anoud. Even Nerezza.
Ludo took out a pad of paper and a pen. He wrote, in fine, even lines:
Is that why you gave us up to Ululiro and those men? To be rid of us?
Nerezza shrugged. She did not look away; she was not ashamed. “Why should you be different? Why should the rest of us be chained to the earth while you go free? I have done what I have done. It is mine to own and pay for. You lived.”
He reached for her hand, and she bore that touch, and so he thought perhaps she was not utterly lost to him.
He wrote: It is not so easy for me after all, you see.
“I do see,” she relented. “But I do not forgive you. And you should not forgive me.”
Ludo wrote: I want to give you what you need, Nerezza. It is important to me.
“You haven't the first idea what I need, Ludo. How dare you?”
He squeezed her hand and lifted it to his lips, kissed it, held it as though with that hand, all he was allowed, he could hold all of her. Ludovico let her hand fall and wrote furiously:
Have I ever told you why I go to the Forum? I go to look at the temple of the Vestals. They lived there, secluded, not just virgins, though that was important, but keepers of wills and historical papers. They wore white; they wore their purity like shields. They were the daughters of Vesta, Vesta, who kept the hearth. And as long as they were inviolable, the city was kept safe, kept whole. Forever. And maybe if they had—because they failed, sometimes, because they were young and they could not choose their nunnery, and they were punished for it, even killed—Rome would not have lost the favor of Vesta and fallen into the dark. Because it was the hearth-goddess who left them without light, without fire. Do you understand?
Nerezza's eyes were full of tears, but they did not fall, they were hard, harder than anything he had within him. Her eyes were sharp and dark, reflected into crystal. She shook her head.
They could not live in the city, Nerezza. They could not drink at the festivals, or take lovers in alleys, or eat mackerel in the market. But without them, the city fell into the dark and the cold, into a hole in the world. Because they were inviolable, the city lived within the circuit of their skin, and they kept it safe, like a mother, like a goddess.
She was crying in earnest then, angrily, harshly, without sound, without forgiveness, but she did not let go of his hand. He kissed her and kissed her again, and slowly, with a small smile, as though it was a joke shared long ago between them, he kissed the tears from her cheek with his round mouth.
Ludovico left her in the café, drying her face, composing it again into eelskin and electricity. He stepped into his taxi and sped off through the Roman streets toward the airport, washed with light, past the ruins of ruins, the city built on its own grave, built out of itself, time and again, a world without end.
ONE
THE FLAYED HORSE
A maya Sei sits in the broad open pavilion of the Fushimi Inari shrine. She folds her hands over her stomach, trying, for the hundredth time, to decide. One thousand blaze-orange torii gates open up behind her, winding up the mountain like a long tunnel into fire. Spiders of improbable size string their rain-colored webs in the corners of the gates. They are pale green, though that means nothing here, still it makes Sei smile. There are huge circles under her eyes, and she feels ill, sore in every joint, in every part. I am the Kami of Engines, she thinks to herself, and I have come to take the winds of my lovers into my belly, and to burn.
This is the eighth day she has waited at the shrine. The stone foxes—she has heard there are thirty-three thousand of them on the mountain, an exact number, yet infinite, infinitely variable vulpine faces, and they regard her now with familiar acceptance, like a family dog who has come to love a frequent visitor. The evening is crisp, the leaves almost all brown now, the persimmons flaccid and smeared on the stones. There is a belt of pale gold around the horizon, and above it, all is blue, a universe of blue, like the light at the bottom of a lake.
But today they do come, walking through the festooned gate of the shrine, three of them, holding hands. They are so beautiful, she thinks. So strong. I have paid such a price for their easy passage, she thinks. It was worth it, that they have not suffered as I have. The woman's skin looks as though it was burned many years ago, but it is healed now, and shining. She is wearing gloves in the cold. One of the men is tall and older, with glasses and poor posture. The other is younger, sad-looking, very thin. But they know her, they know her immediately, and she runs to them, as fast as she can, and despite everything she flings herself into their arms, and kisses the man with glasses as though he is her most desperate wish. He does not give her his tongue, and she does not seek it. And then the woman, whose mouth tastes like the sugar-candies her mother loved, and then the young man, who circles her waist with his arm and lifts her off the ground.
“Come on,” she says in Japanese, but they understand her meaning, and Sei leads them into the tunnel of gates, up and up, one thousand of them, into the crystalline blue night, into the infinite foxes, into the green spiders and the flame-colored pillars. Without knowing why, she begins to run ahead of them, and in her belly the first quavering movement comes with the pounding of her feet. Oh, she thinks, oh, you poor thing. I'm so sorry. You are a terrible toll to pay. I don't think it will hurt. Just… imagine a book at the bottom of a lake. Fish read it. It is your book, all your own, and you can find such wonderful things written there…
And she is filled with terror, and filled with joy, with the brightness of their kisses, with the fluttering of her child, with the light of the first stars, and—
And Sei is speeding at the head of the Flyleaf Line, th
e unpredictable child-train, through the underground and up into the city, the elevated rails, the sassafras-scented air. She cuts her hand with the edge of a steel disc and laughs softly as oil bubbles up from beneath the controls. She presses her palm to it and the shriek of ecstasy that erupts from train and girl shatters three streetlamps as they pass. She sinks into the arms of the Third Rail, and her legs seem to flow into the circuitboard, and her hair seems to flow back over the body of the locomotive, and her arms are pressed back against her sides so that her face, the face of the train, the new train, can feel the wind dancing by.
At Oathusk Station, they will say they saw a train fly. They saw it jump the tracks without the smallest hesitation, jump into the air as though it had waited a lifetime for that jump, and race into the tall grass. The black-faced sheep scattered, and the raspberries exulted as the train that is Sei who is the train moved like light toward the mountains and beyond.
The sound of its whistle, they will say, is like a mother and a child singing together.
VERSO:
YOUNG-EYED CHERUBINS
TWO
THE UNHAPPY ROOK
Sei is so young, and November kisses her like she will never get a chance again. The torii gates stretch up into the night like one gate echoed over and over, a stutter of gates, and the fox statues grin down from their pedestals. When Sei begins to run ahead into the shadows, November can see them, she is sure she can see them, she would swear it, the foxes, one by one, turn their stone heads and bow to them, their little ears flattened against their granite skulls.
She takes Ludovico's hand and begins to run, too, up and up and up, and the spiders all around, if she could but hear them, call her name like a rosary, and—
And Casimira sweeps her up with a laugh like a war trumpet, and sets her down again in a vast red room full of brown notebooks and printing presses and bees crawling the walls. November opens the books, one of them, two, but they are blank.
“Didn't you notice the street names, my darling girl?” Casimira beams. “Enough nouns make a verb, and we have made a verb, and it is us.”
The house tugs at Novembers hand and presses it to his little lips. Hesitantly, with held breath, he extends his pink tongue and licks it gently.
November looks for Ludovico, but he is not there. Her bees fly from her fingertips, into the city, seeking him in her name. She smiles in the arms of Casimira, arms tight and strong and undeniable, arms like victory. They will find him.
In years to come the bees of Palimpsest will be utterly changed, and to be stung by one will be to be honored beyond dreams of grace. On their wings will be printed in infinitesimally delicate script an encyclopedia of Palimpsest, written in a high room in a house that practices its smiles, a high room the house kept hidden for all of them, a lair but not a cave. In the encyclopedia are endless lists of the city's wonders, and in those lists are stories upon stories, and to be stung is to know all of them, and weep for the knowing of.
THREE
THE THREE OF TENEMENTS
The dark descends so fast it steals Oleg's breath, and when they begin to run ahead he is afraid to be left behind, he cannot be left behind, and through the wafting incense of the shrine below he wills his skinny, weakened legs to carry him, to carry him toward them, after them, into the shadows, into the blue, into the mouths of all those foxes, who seem to have his own face, smiling back at him, and seem to be saying:
She is waiting for you. She is waiting, Olezhka. His chest burns as though his heart has been pierced by a spear of flame, and—
And Lyudmila is sitting naked on a broad, dry bed piled with quilts of blue and silver stars. His sister, her arms open, her eyes shining. She speaks to him in Russian and he understands her, falls into her, kisses her laughing, and she laughs with him. When he is inside her he will see snow falling through torchlight on the edge of the Volkhov, which never took any child's breath, which never was anything but a band of silver light in the dark.
In days to come the locks of Palimpsest will fall in love. They will refuse the keys made for them and insist that their owners follow the Albumen until they find an enormous river barge with a canopy of bronze silk, where a thin young man and his wife with hair the color of bread beat keys from the most extraordinary substances, from baleen and dried river mud, sodalite and beryl and bird bones, king s crowns and prison bars, hazel branches and willow wands and corset stays and gold and silver and glass. No lock will settle for less than its most and dearest beloved.
FOUR
THE ARCHIPELAGO
Don't leave me, Ludovico thinks when November starts to run after Sei. But of course, of course she would not. She is his Isidore, and she will lead him into the world. She grabs his hands and they run like children, as though there is a wonderful game ahead and the whole day to come for its playing. November laughs and he thinks the sound of it might shatter him, so high and so sweet, inviolable. In just another moment she will be able to speak to him, in just another moment she will turn to him and he will understand every syllable in the etymology of her, and—
And he wakes on a wooden dais, a huge circle of oak raised slightly above the street. He stares around him, the empty air of an early morning, before anyone is awake, except bakers and postmen. An old woman stands in her doorway, her right leg a huge, twisted bear-limb, holding a tray of steaming, frosted cake. Tears fill up her eyes and roll down her fat cheeks. She drops the cake. Her mouth hangs open.
Klavdia goes inside and snatches another from the window. She comes running to him, finally, finally, after all this time. Casimira promised her, and here he is.
He swallows her cake, drinks her tea.
The war is over.
As Ludovico eats and the old woman fusses over him, her fur bristling against his leg, Ludo turns his eyes north, down the long avenues, to a house with high green spires. It is fitting, he supposes, that I arrived here, in the old place. Out of all of them, I am the traditionalist.
A bee alights softly on his knee. The old bear-woman grins at him. She gives him a little curtsey. A second bee drifts in, and a third.
November, he thinks. He lets the bees coax him onto the street as the first traffic of the morning comes screeching, careening in, and walks up the lane, toward his beloved, his ibex, who leapt from such a far height, and landed on her horns.
THE SUBURBS OF PALIMPSEST SPREAD OUT from the edges of the city proper like ladies’ fans. First the houses, uniformly red, in even lines like veins, branching off into lanes and courts and cul-de-sacs. There are parks full of grass that smells like oranges and little creeks filled with floating roses, blue and black. Children scratch pictures of antelope-footed girls and sparrow-winged boys on the pavement, hop from one to the other. Their laughter spills from their mouths and turns to autumnal leaves, drifting lazily onto wide lawns. The sun glowers red in the east, leaving scarlet shadows on all their cheeks.
There are parks, of course, between the houses. Suburbs create children out of ether, and they require the space. Carousels of bone and fur mirror the exact musculature of horses and giraffes and three-toed sloths, so that the children will naturally be inclined to ride such creatures when they are grown and such a thing becomes a necessity. There, just there-a little girl with violet ribbons like reins in her hair is telling her brother that mother will be away tonight, and they may sneak into the city to dance with women with the heads of white foxes. Wicked child!
Eventually the houses fade into fields: amaranth, spinach, blueberries. Shaggy cows graze; bell-hung goats bleat. Palimpsest is ever hungry. In the morning, milk will splash white as a river into a hundred pails and more, butter will come creamy and yellow, and bread will rise as thick as a heart. There are orchards, peaches and plums, cherries and apples like garnets. There are ponds full of fish, their eyes black and depthless. The farms go on further than the houses, out and out and out.
But these too fade as they extend like arms outstretched, fade into the empty land not yet col
onized by the city, not yet peopled, not yet known. The empty meadows stretch to the horizon, pale and dark, rich and soft.
The war is over.
This was the last of it, and I have told you all you need to know of the breaking of the doors. Find me, find me in black and secret places. I am here; I am waiting. I want no more than any city: to thrive.
Come. Come.
Look out, over my outermost fields, my borderless borders-I am vast enough to contain you.
A wind picks up, blowing hot and dusty and salt-scented. Gooseflesh rises over miles and miles of barren skin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes debts to many people, books being the profligate creatures they are, forever leaving their authors to pay their bills. And so I must settle the tab.
Thank you to Ekaterina Sedia, who once asked me to write her a story about a city.
To Christopher Barzak, an invaluable friend and resource.
To Juliet Ulman, my benevolent editor.
To the members of the Blue Heaven Writers Workshop, especially Paolo Bacigalupi and Daryl Gregory.
To S. J. Tucker, whose music continually explains to me what I've written.
To everyone who has supported me, offline and online, allowed me into their homes and their hearts, held me up, made me tea, and listened to (and read) my nonsense: we are all of us Palimpsest, a strange and marvelous city created only when we are together.
And finally, ever and always, to Dmitri Zagidulin, who doesn't like to be called a muse.